One might have expected Lenore, because of her family life, to display psychological effects. She had, in fact, connected independently with her sexuality early on, but she seemed at first to have absorbed none of the cruel sickness of her father and mother's relationship.

It’s not uncommon to see a very young child, in complete innocence, touching themselves, or expressing curiosity in the private assets of their peers. Lenore was such an innocent. She had an instinctual, automatic love for her body that expressed itself freely, even in public. Her mother couldn’t get her to stop grabbing her crotch Sundays, in church.

"It’s not like she’s being bad", her mother was always quick to point out, "I just can’t seem to get her to stop touching herself."

Lenore's mother, in her secret heart, worried that her husband's dim brutality would have a terrible effect on Lenore. She also, contradictorily, admitted to herself that she stayed married to the asshole so that Lenore would have a nice family upbringing. She had no clue what 'irony' meant, because she'd skipped English class the day they taught that one.

Lenore knew, though. She was no dummy. Whatever DNA spirals had slithered past both of her parents had wound solidly about Lenore. She was an 'A' student all the way through high school, and college. She was especially adept in chemistry and math, and excelled in gymnastics. She was also a natural showoff, quick to befriend other children her age.

She attracted older boys too, an innate talent she would always possess. The boys, many of them sons of the pilots who had abused her dad before she was born, liked the fact that she wasn't shy about showing them her underwear, whenever one of them suggested that she should. They got bolder each time.

The show got more interesting when she entered her teens. The boys started to egg her on to make creative use of her sandbox toys. They started to bring their own things for her to insert into her vagina -- a pot metal toy gun, an old skeleton key, a licorice cigar, marbles, a popsicle. Lenore enjoyed it, oblivious to what they thought of as their exploitation of her. She graduated to the inevitable ping-pong ball one day, after one of the older boys overheard his dad whispering at an officers-only barbecue, to fellow pilots, about an act he'd seen in a Tijuana strip joint. Encouraged, others offered her their metal Dinky Toys, then their fingers, and then their dinks. At first they humped her one at a time. Then one day, they did it one after another.

She felt vaguely hurt when they called her a slut; she knew she wasn’t. She felt she was being free, being herself. Why, if she did what they wanted her to do anyway, because she saw no harm in it, did they laugh and point in public, calling her names and humiliating her? Yet when nobody was there to see them with her, they seemed close, kind, even tender at times.

She had a string of short-term boyfriends that always seemed to treat her that way: was it that she was inevitably attracted to the type, or the other way around? "Is this how friends treat friends?" she would muse to her bedroom ceiling on the nights when mother whimpered down the hall, and she could not reach sleep.

Lenore had always been confused about that...

Eventually, getting a bit older, and after enough such relationships, she concluded that men were all alike. She decided she would just use them any way she could. She figured the feeling was pretty much mutual, anyway.